In the 2013 film A Field in England, we are dropped into the narrative without time, date or explanation. We do, however, glean from the witchfinder hats and disembodied sounds of battle from another field nearby that we are in the midst of the English Civil War (1642– 51). The film's director, Ben Wheatley, later explained that he did not want the audience to understand the culture of the 1600s, which, to our modern sensibilities, would have been very strange indeed. Thus, the film gives us the sense of being dropped into a foreign land. The confusion continues as we are faced by multiple narratives that appear to run at different paces, are often unconnected and even pass in different directions as characters who have died in one moment appear alive in the next. We might take this to be an expression of the granular nature of time, with our ability to make sense of the apparently chaotic scenes being a testament to our ability to make sense of the strange and chaotic universe that we occupy more generally. The weirdness of the film is compounded by a ring of hallucinogenic mushrooms, or ‘fairy ring’, as we learned in Chapter 2, appearing and being eaten by the film's six characters, who then set off on a whole different type of ‘trip’ than the confused quest that they are already on. From this point, Wheatley's storytelling becomes ever less orthodox as we are given the impression that we, the viewers, are also affected by the same mushrooms – though this is of course an illusion.

One among many strange happenings in the film sees a man being pulled across the field by a stout rope lashed around his chest. Wheatley tells us in a later interview that this is a reference to folklore, which describes how entering a fairy ring will place you in ‘a magical realm where time is different’ but that four men can pull you out with a rope. This scene is a metaphor among many that appears to refer to the time in which the film is set.